


the warmth of the blood in my shoe

by Dansnotavampire



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: (mostly), Ash Lynx Lives, Basically this is Ash having a weird relationship with himself and his body over the years, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Child Abuse, Fix-It, Introspection, M/M, POV Second Person, Stabbing, but y'know that's bc i cannot kill my BOY, ie, like. slight AU post canon, which is what the underage warning is for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:48:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28269402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dansnotavampire/pseuds/Dansnotavampire
Summary: There are many lessons that you, Ash Lynx, learn about yourself through the years. Only one of them is pleasant.(As in the tags, the warnings are for references to these events in canon, not. Y'know. Gross shit.)
Relationships: Ash Lynx/Okumura Eiji
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	the warmth of the blood in my shoe

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Emotional Anorexic by Svanar Knútur, which is a _very _Asheiji song, imo.__

You first learn that you - that your  _ body  _ \- is an object of desire, when you are seven. It is not a lesson any seven year old should have to learn, but you learn it nonetheless, and it leaves you with a hollow in your chest where your heart should be, and a sour taste in your mouth at the touch of a hand on you, anywhere, no matter how gentle or how young it is. 

By the time you’re eleven, the fact that you are desirable is firmly entrenched in your mind - in fact, it’s even worse. You’re not just  _ desired,  _ you are  _ commodified.  _ Valued. Precious, you hear sometimes, a precious gem, and it makes your skin feel like it has gained its own sentience, trying to crawl away from your body. (It would leave you bloody and dead, but that would almost be better than this piteous, gilded existence.) 

(Your hands feel numb most of the time, as if they belonged to a corpse rather than to a child.) 

Even as you get older, the crawling-skin sensation stays - even as Golzine stops pimping you out, instead turning to teaching, to limited, cautiously-given freedoms. They are not true freedoms, after all, just gilding on a cage. And the value of gold to a pet bird is nothing. 

One of the only gildings that has any real substance is Blanca - he doesn’t stop you from being precious, from being  _ desired,  _ (the word haunts you like a banshee, a prophetic warning of the thing that will be your downfall, this aching  _ desire  _ that disgusting men feel for people like you) but he does give you a better kind of education. A new list of things to do with your hands, your mouth, your  _ teeth.  _ You shouldn’t bite in a fight - you’re still young, with little power in your jaw, and if you’re that close it’s hard to shoot properly, but it gets you out of a sticky situation once or twice. (You can’t use it when it really matters, but the fact that you have the power gives you a new kind of confidence that you didn’t possess before) 

Despite Blanca, despite his weapons and his novels and his secret trips to the library, though, your skin still crawls away from you if you have any time left to rest, even after Golzine unlocks the bars of your cage and looses you, his perfectly trained singing shrike, into the wilds. You still have the hollow sitting in your chest where your heart should be, and you still have the hands of a corpse, and part of you knows that your cage hasn’t so much been  _ opened  _ as it has been  _ expanded.  _

The day you get the feeling - the  _ life  _ \- back in your hands starts off like any other - a golden sunrise that you stay up for, rather than waking up to, the smell of car exhaust and sea salt and sewage, the weight of a gun in your belt, in your hands. 

It doesn’t  _ end  _ like any other though - in fact, it’s about halfway through (by your count, anyway - it may be evening, but you didn’t wake up until it had gone noon) when  _ something _ happens, and you feel your world shift slightly to the left. The boy in your bar  _ shouldn’t  _ be remarkable - his hands are uncalloused, and his doe-eyes are wide and innocent, and the only thing special about him is how much he  _ stands out _ , like a single white lotus on a scum-lined pond. 

You don’t know why you decide to let him hold your gun. Maybe it’s his innocence, the way that he could never hurt another person with it, the way that his eyes glimmer as he asks you. Part of you thinks that he should at least learn the weight of it in his hands, if he’s going to be assisting with an article on your way of life. There’s a weird kind of jealousy, too, jealousy of the fact that he has never been forced to hold a gun to survive. A jealousy that is antithetical to itself - you want to preserve that innocent smile, make the gun in his hands an object of wonder, rather than one of blood and tears and the bitter fight to survive. 

(Jealousy, you realise later, wasn’t the right word. It was  _ longing,  _ longing for a life where you were fascinated by firearms, rather than numb to them. That realisation, though, comes far too late - when even innocent, snarky, doe-eyed and beautiful idiot Eiji has fired a gun, and not just for practice this time.) 

He puts the life back into your hands, fills the aching hollow of your chest for the first time in ten long years, at a time that is technically the next morning; you haven’t slept yet, though, so you count it as the same day. You watch him  _ fly,  _ risking his life, landing with no mat on the broken glass (and on your heart, suddenly full of blood and beating again) to save you, to save Skipper, not expecting anything in return, and you make up your mind, then and there. If you make it out of this, you are going to give everything you can to make it up to Eiji, to keep him safe. (And isn’t it ironic? The only person who asked you for nothing being the one who you would give your all.) 

This newfound life, the sensation in your bloody hands and the furious pounding of your heart, is strange. It is tears when your brother dies, wept ugly and alone on the top of a skyscraper into a dying sun. It is teaching a sweet Japanese fool to shoot, despite your reluctance and his seeming-fear of the gun in his hands. It is a kiss, stolen, purely for utility, and the promise to yourself that you’ll give him a real one one day, no matter what. 

It is also a fire, burning in a basement, destroying your best friend in a way that is better left unspoken of, unthought about. It is the crushing feeling in your chest, when Eiji gets shot, when you can’t even manage to  _ touch  _ him as you say goodbye, for what you know will be the last time, as much as you know he hopes it isn’t. 

(You love him, so much, and that means that it’s better if you let him leave. He can’t be hurt by you if he’s on the other side of the world.)

He leaves you a letter, though, and that?  _ That  _ reminds you what being truly alive feels like - the beating of before had just been your heart, but this thrums through your lungs, your arms, your legs, fills your once-dead hands with life again, and you stand up, and you  _ run,  _ for the first time in years, towards something. The pound of your feet against the pavement sends aches up your legs, your breath bursts, ragged and excited from your lungs, and your heart skitters in your chest, like a child once again.  _ He loves you. _

_ He loves you! _

_ He lov- _

There is a knife, in your gut, and your hand immediately goes to your gun, firing once, into the wielder’s - Lao’s - chest. 

_ Fuck.  _

He - Eiji Okumura - loves you, and you are going to die. His plane - his plane will have left. And you know, with the kind of certainty that sits inside your lungs, that he’s safer without you. So, you don’t go to the hospital - you go to the library, and you sit in your chair, and you read that letter, over and over, a smile on your face that you hope will stay there until you die, for real this time. 

Except, that death isn’t the death that you get - your real death comes much later, old and in your bed, a lifetime’s worth of memories in your head and an extra language on your lips. 

Instead, you wake up in a hospital bed, Eiji asleep in one of the chairs next to you, Max awake in the other. 

“You gave us quite a scare there, kid,” he tells you, a fragile smile on his face. You can’t speak, and he carries on. “It took them four hours to realise that you weren’t just napping.” 

You blink, slowly, and in a voice, husky from disuse, murmur “I’m sorry. I-” 

Max cuts you off. “I don’t need your excuses,” he says, and jerks his chin at Eiji, who is still snoring peacefully. “He does, though. Hasn’t moved since he got here - even cancelled the rest of his flight for you, came back when they stopped midway, Shunichi said it was a nightmare.” 

You just nod. 

“Anyway,” Max says, standing from his seat and stretching. “I’ll leave you two alone - Eiji finally fell asleep after 22 hours, so you might not want to wake him up, but… I figure you won’t want me around for your reunion.” 

You hate that he’s right.

Eiji wakes up half an hour later, and the bags under his eyes almost make you wish that he hadn’t - he looks so  _ tired,  _ but he squeezes your hand and smiles at you with grateful, tired eyes, and whispers “I missed you.” 

You laugh. “It can’t have been that long, can it?”

He glowers, simultaneously adorable and heartbreaking. “It has been three days. And thirteen hours.”

_ Fuck.  _

“I’m sorry - Eiji, I’m so sorry. I-”

He  _ shh _ -es you, gently, like all of his actions. “It is fine, Ash. You are alive, and you are with me. That is - that is okay. Good. Enough.” 

You learn one final lesson after that - the right one, this time. It starts later that day, with Eiji whispering promises into your hair, and carries on for the rest of your lives together.

You - not your body, not your hands, just _you_ , Ash Lynx \- are enough. Are loved, are cared for, outside of what you can do for people, to people. You spend the rest of your life learning that lesson, with Eiji by your side, and eventually, you come to believe it. 

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to hit me up on tumblr @dansnotavampire if you wanna yell about these Lads with me
> 
> As always, comments and kudos are v v appreciated


End file.
